Ask A Genius 557 – Trump Now
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Trump’s situation now?
Rick Rosner: It is 19 weeks until the election. There have been 123,000 confirmed U.S. coronavirus deaths are a rally last week; Trump said that he has been trying to slow down coronavirus testing in the U.S. because he doesn’t want so many people coming back positive with it.
His people said he’s joking. He went back and said that he is not. He is a terrible guy. He promised to build the wall. The border between the U.S. and Mexico is 1,950 miles. He has only put up 210 miles of wall, so only slightly more than 10% of the border.
Of those 210 miles, only 3 miles are walls in places where there was no previous border. So, his great wall is a piece of shit. He’s got the most corrupt administration in history. He owns the 19 largest point drops on the DOW-Jones industrial average in history.
He’s increased the deficit by trillions. 675,000 people or so have died – more people – under Trump in 41-months than in 41 months under any other president. Only 1/3rd is due to increased population.
It’s hard to really defend him in any way. He’s down to Biden in the polls by roughly 10 points. Although, Hillary up on Trump by similar margins, even later in the election cycle. But the world odds, you can’t bet on politics in the U.S. but can in England.
Odds in England have gone from more than 50% to less than 50% of Trump winning. It does a little good if Trump loses and the Republicans hold the Senate because Mitch McConnell is as bas for the country as Trump.
But every who doesn’t like Trump, which is the majority of the country, is cheering for him to fall apart. His rally to open up his campaign after no rallies was puked by Gen Z people. People in TikTok and who like K-Pop.
They ordered a millions tickets to te Arizona rally. People expected overflow crowds. They only filled a 1/3rd of this 19,000 person area. So, it looked really bad for him. But it is still too early. He is at 40% aggregate approval if you combine the polls compared to a 45.8% two months ago when he was doing daily press briefings about coronavirus.
So, he has lost little more than 10% of the people who approve of him in 2 months. He’s given up on coronavirus. There is not a push to increase testing. There’s not a push for much contact tracing.
If you combine both of things, you could get a handle on the virus in the U.S. The way other countries have done and push it down to negligible numbers. South Korea has had only 280 deaths from coronavirus.
They still have an average of 1 or 2 a week, where we average 5,000 a week and have more than 400 times as many deaths as South Korea has had. Our curve of new cases never came close to zero. It dropped from highs of 30,000 per day to roughly 20,000 a day for a month or a month and a half.
Since the country is being opened, 4 out of the past 5 days, we have been back above 30,000 new confirmed cases a day. I am guessing within the next 2 weeks; we will break our all-time record for most new cases in a day.
For states in denial about it, Texas, Arizona, and Florida, the hospitals are starting to overflow in Arizona and Texas. They may get harder than they are getting hit now. Tis may be the thing that erodes Trump’s support even further, but who knows.
His support has been the steadiest of any president since they started polling under FDR more than 80 years ago. His range of approval and disapproval, if you don’t count the first polls because people want to give the new president the benefit of the doubt, since the first week has ranged between 45.8% and 37%.
It is a tight margin compared to every other president. It may not be possible to get his support to drop much below 39%. Because those weeks of him in the 37s were 2.5 years ago, 3 years ago, before people got used to that he was going to be an asshole for his entire presidency.
They got used to it after the initial shock. It may not be possible. There may be some gradual erosion to 40 or into the 39s, then there will be the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The candidates, usually, get a bump for a couple percent from their conventions.
So, I don’t know. I expect the week of the election; he will be around 40% approval. The week of the election will have about 200,000 coronavirus dead or more. The country will probably have had to shut down more again.
But there are millions of people who will not admit to pollsters that they will vote for Trump because they find it embarrassing. There is a chance that he will still win. That’s where we are at now. He looks or the country looks worse than ever.
There is an all-time low for the number of Americans who say they are happy, which is 14%. I think the previous low was 29%. So, most of the country thinks he is a monster. 40% still stands by him.
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